Well, I realize that 1970s sounds like an age of dinosaurs to some people… But, people back then weren’t cavemen. They had electricity, batteries, video cameras, telephones.

The concept of an electric outlet in a couch is easy - not sure, but they might even had such things back then. Like to feed a lamp or something. USB is just low voltage and different connector, from the power transmission perspective.

The concept of a speakerphone with video signal is also easy. The only thing to grasp is that the devices and batteries became that miniature and efficient. Oh, and wireless.

Explaining that all video and voice recordings from all these neat devices are actually stored by a gigantic corporation, processed with voice and face recognition algorithms, and used to enrich personal profiles collected on all parties of the conversation to boost profits of said corporations, and many people even pay for this - THAT I would find complicated to explain.

Fennec is a poor alternative because it connects to Firefox services. Sync is optional, but some internal components will talk to Mozilla, and Mozilla changed their mind about “never selling your data” recently.

Brave is Chrome with a history of suspicious moves, toxic leadership, involvement with crypto and AI

LibreWolf is a decent alternative. I switched to it a while ago as Firefox enshittification required more and more tweaks in configuration to close leaks.

I’ve heard good things about Mullvad browser too especially on fingerprint resistance, but LibreWolf works for me well enough to not search for alternatives.

For rare sites that I need to use and which don’t work in Firefox based browsers, I just use Brave.

And Mullvad is not in business if selling user profiles to advertisers, at least as far as we know

Because the data used in browser fingerprinting is also used to render pages. Example: a site needs to know the size of browser window to properly fit all design elements.

I think this should be baked into client apps.

The popular email analogy works here too. When you are setting up a new phone, you get a default email client app that offers you to log in or sign up to the default email service. And usually user can choose to log in with their service if choice, for which they have to sign up in advance outside the client app.

Having a default Fediverse client on new phones is not happening anytime soon, but if someone’s mother installs a client app from the store link sent to them by a family member, she can get similar default onboarding experience.

Default instance can be picked by geo location, or maybe the less used out of 3 most popular instances. Or even maybe an instance ran by the client app developers.

FAKE NEWS!!! Why would you want to pull an ancient lever mechanism if you can do it in a few taps on the touch screen. Sure, unless you have a premium subscription, you’ll have to watch a short video from our partners, tailored individually just for you.

Apple does extensive audit of mobile apps, including limitations of tracking. So the app cannot spy on something you are not letting it to know. But you are giving it a bunch of info voluntarily.

I’d say using that app on iOS is similar to making a food delivery order using a loyalty member ID. Basically, you are letting the company (McDonald’s) know who you are, what is your phone number, where do you live, and what do you like to eat. And if they wish to, they could use all that to purchase your profile from a data brocker. Or they can sell that info for a few cents to make up on that discount.

Oh come on, the header is a clickbait. There is a US military base in Israel already, it’s been there for years. The article is about an announcement that they are sending another missile defense battery with personnel alongside

@switchedtolinux@fosstodon.org has a YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoryWpk4QVYKFCJul9KBdyw

Well, my original plan was to copy configuration over after I install apos that are not available as flatpaks. Looks like I can copy configuration for those too, just to another location

Interesting. It says that the project is in pre-alpha stage… not sure if I would be able to verify the scripts it generates

That’s what I mostly do now. But it requires some extra work, as some apps are not available in Ubuntu DEB repository. Also, I don’t like the approach that Canonical takes, pushing snaps so much

I really like GNOME. I know not enough about security of it compared to Cinnamon

Thanks! This is helpful

I see your point… I use Debian for my self-hosted environment, so having similar system on desktop may save some cognitive load. My main arguments against Debian are (maybe misinformed though):

• No btrfs support in installer OK, Debian wiki says it’s there
• Major annual upgrades to keep up with stable look more scary than more incremental and frequent updates of Fedora. And using Sid as someone suggested sounds too crazy for main PC

So yeah, looks like it’s just upgrades… Gives me something to think about while I’m moving my apps to flatpaks

Thanks!

Bookmarks and passwords are taken care of. And for the apps I’ll try to get migrated to flatpaks as many as I can while still on original system.

I also see that full disk encryption is being recommended a lot, and I don’t have any solid reasons to encrypt only /home.

I have not given much thought on Silverblue. Is it “flatpak-only”? If so I’ll need to go through my apps to see if that could work. And my backup strategy will need to change - I use Duplicacy that is not available as a Flatpak

Yeah, looks like migration of flatpaks between OS is easy and makes sense a lot

Oh, that’s neat! Thanks!

Lots of good advice here, but many might be too extreme. I find such all-or-nothing approach intimidating for people who just started to think about improving their privacy situation.

Let’s see… you are angry about bloatware. It can come from two sources - mobile service carrier and phone manufacturer. How to get rid of it?

1. Buy only “unlocked” phones. Then the carrier will not be able to push anything to your phone. You will also be free to change the carrier as you wish.
2. Buy phones from manufacturers that don’t install too much bloatware. Google Pixel has only Google apps, Motorola also is almost vanilla Google. Fairphone is more exotic, but an interesting option. iPhone is OK too if you want Apple ecosystem, but customization is not a thing there.

Now, we are in a privacy focused community and I saw your later comments about Google being an opposite of privacy. I would argue that vanilla Pixel is much better than bloated and locked Samsung already. I see you get recommendations to replace the OS that your new phone might run, and these are valid, but come with significant downsides. There are other ways to improve your privacy stance by changing the way how you use your phone without changing what phone or what OS you run on it.